I’ve reached a point in life where, more than things, I prefer collecting moments.
– Pablo Rubio Ordás
Pablo Rubio Ordás answered these questions from 30,000 feet. Simply because he was on a plane to Madrid when they arrived, and it struck him as a reasonable use of the time. Four years into commuting between Madrid and Brussels, he’s learned to treat the in-between as a working surface: a place to sketch, to write, to answer an interview, to think through something before it lands.
Madrid-born, he walked away from engineering studies in his twenties to pursue a different kind of precision. In 2003 he founded Erretres. The Strategic Design Company, and has spent the two decades since arguing — sometimes loudly, usually through the work itself — that design deserves a seat at the same table as strategy, capital, and engineering. Outside the studio, he co-founded Nordic Bikes (a premium e-bike company with Danish DNA), writes a widely read newsletter called Design4Growth, and in 2022 published a book on digital branding in Japan.
Two decades of work, a handful of ventures, and, in theory, a schedule that should keep a person in constant forward motion. And yet the first thing he wanted to talk about wasn’t the next meeting, or the next airport.
It was home.
“After all the miles,” he told us, “the best destination isn’t somewhere new. It’s going back.” It’s the kind of line you expect from someone who has been somewhere. Pablo has. What follows is a conversation about the quieter forms of movement — the ten-minute nap, the morning walk, the coffee that structures a day — and how a designer who builds category-defining brands for a living eventually learns to leave most of his tools at home.
Walking the City He Could Ride Through
There’s an honest contradiction at the center of Pablo’s life. He sells beautiful, premium e-bikes. He owns one. He owns a wonderful car, too. And what he reaches for, most days, is his own feet.
“Nothing beats it,” he said. Walking to work. Hopping on the subway. Watching people. Taking a different route home each evening — not to get there faster, but to keep a pace and notice what’s shifted. The city, in his version of it, isn’t a grid to cross. It’s a surface to read.
That instinct to slow down inside a place rather than through it shows up in everything he builds. Brands included.
Coffee, a Ten-Minute Nap, and the Third Space
Pablo is unusually honest about one thing: he is terrible at unplugging. There’s always a project, always a concern, always something with a pulse. So he’s built small architectural defenses into the day.
Coffee time, he says, is the best moment of it. It structures him more than the gym does. He’ll sit, open a book just enough to crack the spine without breaking it, and breathe in the pages. For a few minutes, nothing is required of him.
He also misses the naps. At his first job, renting an apartment on Madrid’s Fuencarral Street, he’d walk home for lunch and take a ten-minute nap before heading back. “I need to get that habit back,” he said.
He’s fluent, too, in the language of the third space — that territory that belongs neither to home nor to the office. Starbucks named it and built a strategy on it; now, as he points out, it’s a battleground where coffee shops, malls, and gyms are all fighting for the role. What hooks him about those places is the paradox at their heart: intimacy inside anonymity. You can be alone and surrounded at once.
He lives in Madrid and loves it. But the place that makes him feel most alive — the one he’s returned to fifteen times, the one that published his book on digital branding in 2022 — is Tokyo. Which probably explains why, when he talks about it later in this conversation, the register shifts.
What the Grief Rearranged
Two years ago, Pablo lost his older sister, his father, and one of his closest childhood friends in close succession. Everything he’d built a life around — the company, the family, the projects, the quiet certainty that he could carry all of it — came apart.
“The world fell apart,” he said. “And so did me.”
The way back wasn’t dramatic. He hired a personal trainer. He joined an online program for founders in the U.S. For six months, he worked on his body, and more quietly, on the way he thought. What emerged was a shift he describes simply: a mindset of abundance instead of scarcity.
It’s not the kind of thing a designer says easily. But it surfaces in how he talks about objects, now — about what he’s willing to lose, and what he’d rather collect instead.
The Banana Test
Ask Pablo what makes something well-designed and he won’t talk about features. He’ll talk about a banana.
“It’s an unbeatable piece of natural design,” he said. “Unique taste, iconic shape, incredible nutrients, easy to carry, no packaging needed.”
The best-designed things, in his reading, tend to be humble, timeless, almost anonymous. It’s a philosophy he points to in Apple’s own thinking: good design isn’t about features — it’s about fitting the right context at the right moment. The sound of something closing. A texture. The way two parts come together with no fuss.
Which is why he travels light. The daily backpack holds a MacBook Pro, cables, gym clothes, and — every single day, without exception — a tupperware with porridge, whey protein, blueberries, and peanut butter. He describes this himself as boring. It’s also exactly the point. The things he carries are the things that work.
A Collection of Sounds
The collection he actually wishes he had is a library of sensory memory.
As a designer, his visual recall is sharp. He can summon a space, a film frame, a typographic choice almost at will. What he can’t summon as easily are the sounds and the smells — and those, he thinks, are what most people carry longest.
He brings up Tokyo again. If you’ve been, he says, you know: the Hitachi elevator tones, the chime that greets you when you walk into a Family Mart, the micro-jingles looping quietly inside stores. He recently found a handful of Instagram accounts that reproduce those sounds, and he listens when a particular flavor of Japan nostalgia hits.
He’d like to press play on a city. Not the images and videos we already have too many of — a soundtrack, a smell, a taste. A city as a sensory archive.
What’s Next
The next two months will, on paper, be too much. Madrid, Brussels, Barcelona, London, Switzerland, Japan.
In Madrid, he’ll speak at the BrandDays! festival in front of thousands. A workshop in London. A client event in Barcelona. A trip to Switzerland with his fifteen-year-old son, who is, in Pablo’s words, completely obsessed with the country — which is reason enough.
Then Japan. Two talks in the tallest buildings in Tokyo: one at Arc Hills, another on the forty-ninth floor of Roppongi Hills. He’s given talks in both before. “Nothing excites me more right now,” he said.
And then, presumably, the best part of all of it. Going home.
A Quiet Reflection
There’s a version of this interview in which Pablo talks only about the travel — the conferences, the cities, the frequent-flier miles. There’s another in which he talks only about the loss, the recovery, the discipline.
The version he gave us is both. Which is, we think, how a good life actually feels when you’re inside it. You design something. You walk home a different way. You notice the chime of a convenience store in a city you’ve been to fifteen times. You take a ten-minute nap. You come back stronger than you left.
SOTIYO is built for this rhythm — the one that isn’t rushed, isn’t loud, and rarely needs announcing. Human Flow isn’t a phrase for people who travel. It’s a phrase for people who pay attention while they do.
Pablo Rubio Ordás pays attention. And somewhere around the fifteenth trip to Tokyo, he learned what the rest of us are still figuring out: that the best destination is the one you want to come back from.
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Or keep reading — Frank Bach Conversation or Pablo Serret de Ena —each conversation in the series is a different answer to the same quiet question: how do we move well through the world?
